What is Ability Haste in League of Legends & What Happened to CDR?
The upcoming League of Legends pre-season 11 details have recently been announced, and we’ve learned of a game-changing new stat called Ability Haste. Similar to cooldown reduction (CDR), Ability Haste affects the amount of times a player can cast a spell.
This new stat will soon completely replace CDR, bringing along new features that may completely change how your favorite champions are played.
Our goal when tuning the move from CDR to Ability Haste is that there is on average the same amount of Cooldown Reduction on champs.
— Mark Yetter (@MarkYetter) August 7, 2020
The upside (and why we're doing it) is that build flexibility is dramatically better and there are more choices around haste vs non haste builds.
Unlike CDR, Ability Haste is uncapped and will experience linear scaling much like armor. Although players won’t reach zero cooldowns on their abilities, they can experience up to a 50% reduction, which is 10% higher than the current cap. Additionally, because Ability Haste scales linearly, players buying the stat will see the exact same impact no matter how much of it they already have. In other words, 1 Ability Haste equals to 1% more abilities cast. Simple.
Why would Riot overhaul cooldown reduction?
The reason why Riot Games decided to completely overhaul CDR into Ability Haste is due to its exponential growth. Champions who went from 30 CDR to 40 CDR found better results than going from 0 to 30 CDR. Riot’s main goal for this preseason update is to make the game fair and encourage creativity with the game. The belief is that creating uniform scaling to ability cast time helps achieve that goal.
Trying to figure out ability haste vs cdr. @RiotSupport help us pic.twitter.com/KZhRvpPyGA
— Rizo (@Rizo411) September 29, 2020
This will also keep players from worrying about building CDR consistently since CDR experiences exponential growth, meaning the more a player has the more valuable the stat becomes. There’s no pressure to buy more with Ability Haste.
Additionally, Ability Haste will be featured on more items, especially the 22 new items Riot will release soon. And because it’s much simpler to keep track of in-game, it may be easier for the Riot team to balance it.
As Pre-season goes through the trials and errors of PBE, a few of the many items coming up include Ability Haste in their kits. Some of these items are:
- ➤Sunfire Aegis
- ➤Frostfire Gauntlets
- ➤Everfrost
- ➤Prowler’s Claw
- ➤Duskblade of Draktharr
- ➤Trinity Force
- ➤Black Cleaver
- ➤Death’s Dance
- ➤Zeke’s Convergence
- ➤Knight’s Vow
- ➤Mikael’s Blessing
- ➤Muramana
Reworks for Transcendence and Cosmic Insight on PBE, to account for the swap to Ability Haste pic.twitter.com/DdJ4ixrWYT
— Spideraxe (@Spideraxe30) September 29, 2020
Because these pre-season changes are still on the PBE, players should expect adjustments before the actual patch goes on live servers.